Insurance for the Weather Gambler |
 Dave Thurlow, Host |
Do you like to play the weather odds? Would you go to Miami during hurricane season, or take a trip to Buffalo in January? If so, you might consider hedging your bets by taking out a little weather insurance. Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow from the Mount Washington Observatory and this is The Weather Notebook.
Many kinds of travel coverage will reimburse you if you have to cut your trip short--for example, if your cruise ship is stuck in port because of a hurricane threat. What if the weather doesn't scuttle your trip but just makes it miserable?
One company is now offering insurance that protects you in case your holiday becomes a washout. The firm is called Worldwide Weather Insurance. For the past 12 years they've been protecting concerts, crops, sporting events, and other activities from meteorological danger. Now the company has launched a Web site that allows everyone to take out a policy that protects their wallets from the weather.
The policy provides a full refund on a trip that lasts from 5 to 30 days - but that's only if it rains every day, at least one-hundredth of an inch, between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. What if you consider your vacation ruined if it rains only every other day? In that case, you can spend a bit more for a policy that pays off when more than 50 percent of the days are "rainy" as defined above. Either way, you're going to pay more to insure a trip to soggy Seattle in January than you would to bone-dry Las Vegas in July. Then again, if you're heading to Vegas, you just might be planning to gamble with more than the atmosphere.
Thanks to today's contributing writer Bob Henson, who chases tornadoes for vacation -- I guess he needs insurance against good weather. Learn more about this and about our new book called Soul of the Sky at mountwashington.org. The Weather Notebook is underwritten by Subaru with major support provided by the National Science Foundation.
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